Neverwinter Dev Blog: Regeneration and Life Steal Changes

As with any expansion in Neverwinter, there are going to be some class balancing changes. In Elemental Evil, however, the stats Life Steal and Regeneration are undergoing a major optimization. With such a transformation on the horizon, we decided to have a chat with the Neverwinter development team and get a better insight into these changes.

Regeneration and Life Steal will both have significant changes to make them fit more harmoniously into Neverwinter’s class balancing scheme. These changes are something that we have been working towards for a while and are ultimately geared toward giving tanks and healers a more solidly defined place in the game. We're also giving players a free full character respec with the release of Elemental Evil, so they will be able to reallocate their stats as they see fit when the module comes out.

Regeneration was reworked to no longer provide passive in-combat healing over time and will instead improve all healing spells cast on you. It will, however, provide out-of-combat passive healing like it did before. This allows us to solidify it as a powerful tanking stat while still keeping other defensive stats relevant. We decided to make this change because Regeneration wasn’t filling the place we wanted design-wise, which was as a strong defensive stat for tanks. When we saw how widely it was used and that it was providing too much survivability, we decided to tweak it in order to make it geared more toward tanks. Making a character more receptive to incoming healing also serves to promote synergy between the tank and healer. Any companions’ bonuses that affect Regeneration will still increase Regeneration, but might work a bit differently. Using the Fawn of Shiallia as an example, instead of providing a constant heal over time via her Regeneration buff, she will instead make all healing spells (including her own) cast on you far more potent. So while the manner in which she heals you might be different, she will still remain a powerful healing companion.

For Life Steal, we found that it was providing too much healing and disproportionally increased survivability by more than most other defensive stats could compete. Thus, we decided to make it more of a gamble that would turn the tide of a fight by healing you for a large amount when it activates, but preventing players from being able to rely on it as their only true defensive option. Before, players had 100% chance to heal for a percent of their Life Steal severity. Now, they have a percent-based chance to receive 100% of Life Steal severity. Classes that rely a lot on Life Steal as part of their skill repertoire, such as Temptation Warlocks, have had their feats redone to ensure that their class and build can still remain relevant in PvE and PvP in the face of this change.

With these changes we hope to see players discovering new and innovative ways to play their classes. The advent of Epic Dungeons along with the Oathbound Paladin are sure to help create a more diverse and intriguing field of gameplay within Neverwinter.